Hacker News Reader

Comment by snorkel | Hacker News Reader

I've lived Ruby land and Python world for quite some time and I must say it's good to be back in home in PHP where getting things done doesn't involve clever semantics and tying yourself up in layers of abstraction. Oh yeah, and it's nice to read code that has comments explaining what the hell is going on too (seems Rubyists and Pythonistas don't believe in comments, you know, because that'd make the code too obvious)

View on HN

As somebody who maintains and develops a commercial WordPress site as well as doing Rails work, my impression is the opposite: Rails projects tend to be moderately easy to follow while PHP projects tend to be composed of 10kloc balls of intertwined logic, state and IO with no comments aside from a healthy helping of:

    // $var = foo(bar);
    $var = baz(bar);

Perhaps we're both encountering a bit of luck rather than accurately assessing the two languages' ecosystems.

+1 for pragmatism.

Despite the stigma attached to PHP, it's my go to language for web stuff because it gets shit done very very quickly.

You can't beat drop file, edit, refresh and entire deployments which can be done with cp/scp and no process restarts.

"gets shit done very very quickly"

In what way does PHP help to get things up and running faster than other languages?

Have you used PHP? Spend 5 minutes with it and you'll understand; a very expressive language, simple to learn, massive library of functions, massive number of examples to copy, no framework to learn, no syntactical overhead like in Java, practically everything works with, or has bindings for PHP.

I prefer to work in python, but I don't much care anymore, each language has it's strengths and weakness' but PHP most definitely is good for getting things done "very very quickly"

Yes you can get up and running quickly with php, but my comment was mostly about the fact that it is not much slower in other languages (most of the time not slower at all).

And yes I did a lot of PHP but that was 5-6 years ago. I know things have changed a lot since then but the language still has a lot of the same flaws.

It is when you consider the deployment models, the development server setup etc.

The language has as many flaws as it's always had but it still works.

You've obviously never looked at the Django/Flask/requests/SQLAlchemy code if you think lack of comments is a problem in Python.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com